Alfred E. Neuman

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What, Me Worry?

Alfred E. Neuman is the fictional mascot of EC Publications' Mad magazine. The face had drifted through American pictography for decades before being claimed by Mad editor Harvey Kurtzman after he spotted it on the bulletin board in the office of Ballantine Books editor Bernard Shir-Cliff, later a contributor to various magazines created by Kurtzman.

Since his debut in Mad, Neuman's likeness, distinguished by jug ears, a missing front tooth, and one eye disquietingly higher than the other, has graced the cover of all but a handful of the magazine's 450+ issues. His face does not translate well to profile, and thus he has almost always been shown in full frontal view or in silhouette.

He first appeared in November, 1954, on the cover of Ballantine's The Mad Reader, a paperback collection of reprints from the first two years of Mad. His first appearance in the magazine was on the cover of Mad #21, dated March 1955, as part of a mock ad; a rubber mask bearing his likeness with "idiot" written underneath was offered for $1.20. His next appearance was in the border of the first magazine version of Mad, issue #24, dated July 1955, with his now-familiar signature phrase "What, me worry?" written underneath. Initially the phrase was rendered "What? Me worry?" Neuman also appeared, by name only, in an early Don Martin feature, "Alfred E. Neuman Answers Your Questions." In it, Neuman answered a letter from a suicidal reader by giving "expert advice" on the best technique for tying a hangman's knot.

In late 1956, Neuman's identity became fixed, when he appeared on the cover of Mad #30 as a write-in candidate for the Presidency. His features, which had first been rendered in black-and-white by Bill Elder, were fine-tuned and recreated in color by Norman Mingo. It was this image that appeared on the cover of issue #30, and which became the character's defining portrait.

Mingo painted seven more Neuman covers through 1957, and would eventually be the magazine's signature cover artist throughout the 1960s and 1970s, although Kelly Freas rendered Neuman for Mad from 1958 to 1962.

Mad routinely combines Neuman with another character for its cover images. Neuman has appeared in a slew of guises, including Santa Claus, Darth Vader, George Washington, King Kong, Baby New Year, Lawrence of Arabia, Batman, Robin, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Rosemary's Baby, George S. Patton, the Fiddler on the Roof, Alex from A Clockwork Orange, Barbra Streisand, Mr. T, Indiana Jones, Radar O'Reilly, Bruce Springsteen, Mr. Spock, Pee Wee Herman, Michael Jackson, a California Raisin, Don King, Robin Hood, Abraham Lincoln, Guns n Roses' Slash, the Man in the Moon, an Oscar statuette, Jabba the Hutt, Wolverine, Gollum, Spongebob Squarepants, Agent Smith from The Matrix, Shrek, Dr. Octopus, The Incredibles' Jack-Jack, George W. Bush, Justin Timberlake, Harry Potter, Barry Bonds, the Mona Lisa, and Uncle Sam ("Who Needs You?") among many other familiar faces. Since his unsuccessful run in 1956, he has periodically been re-offered as a candidate for President with the slogan, "You could do worse... and always have!"

Considering Neuman's ubiquity as a cover boy, it is perhaps ironic that the single highest-selling issue of Mad depicted only his feet. The cover image, spoofing the 1973 film The Poseidon Adventure, showed Neuman floating upside-down inside a life preserver.

Along with his face, Mad also includes a short humorous quotation credited to Neuman with every issue's table of contents. These quotations were collected in the book, Mad: The Half-Wit and Wisdom of Alfred E. Neuman (Warner Treasures, 1997), illustrated by Sergio Aragonés.

Neuman's famous catch phrase is the intellectually uncurious "What, me worry?" This was changed for one issue to "Yes, me worry!" after the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in 1979.

Over the decades, Neuman has often appeared in political cartoons as a shorthand for unquestioning stupidity. In recent years, Alfred E. Neuman's features have frequently been merged with those of George W. Bush by editorial cartoonists such as Mike Luckovich and Tom Tomorrow. The image has also appeared on magazine covers (notably The Nation^[1]), and in numerous Photoshop images and GIF files in which Neuman's face morphs into Bush's. A large Bush/Neuman poster was part of the Washington protests that accompanied Bush's 2001 inauguration. The alleged resemblance between the two has been noted more than once by Hillary Clinton. On July 10, 2005, speaking at the Aspen Institute's Ideas Festival, she said, "I sometimes feel that Alfred E. Neuman is in charge in Washington," referring to Bush's purported "What, me worry?" attitude. Neuman's features have also been compared to others in the public eye, including Prince Charles, Ted Koppel and David Letterman.

1 Genesis
2 Appearances outside of Mad
3 Trivia
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Genesis

Neuman's origins are shrouded in mystery and may never be fully known. It is possible that he was inspired, at least in part, by 19th-century medical pictures of people with deficiency diseases or hormone imbalances. Similar faces also turned up in advertising for "painless" dentistry.

Neuman's image has also been used negatively, as a "supporter" of rival political candidates, with the idea that only an idiot would vote for them. An almost-identical image appeared as "nose art" on an American World War II bomber, where it was sometimes referred to as "The Jolly Boy".

When Mad was sued for copyright infringement by a woman claiming to hold the rights to the image, one defense it used was that it had copied the picture from materials dating back to 1911. The lawsuit was unsuccessful, and the boy's face is now permanently associated with Mad.

Since the EC editors had grown up listening to radio, this was frequently reflected in their stories, names and references. The name "Alfred E. Neuman" derived from comedian Henry Morgan's "Here's Morgan" radio series on Mutual, ABC and NBC. One character on his show had a name that was an obvious reference to composer Alfred Newman (1901-70), who scored many films and also composed the familiar fanfare that accompanies 20th Century Fox's opening film logo. The possible inspiration for Henry Morgan was that Laird Cregar portrayed Sir Henry Morgan in The Black Swan (1942) with Tyrone Power, and the Oscar-nominated score for that film was by Newman.

Listening to the sarcastic Morgan's brash broadcasts, the Mad staff took note and reworked the name into Alfred E. Neuman, as later recalled by Kurtzman:

The name Alfred E. Neuman was picked up from Alfred Newman, the music arranger from back in the 1950s and 1940s. Actually, we borrowed the name indirectly through The Henry Morgan Show. He was using the name Alfred Newman for an innocuous character that you'd forget in five minutes. So we started using the name Alfred Neuman. The readers insisted on putting the name and the face together, and they would call the "What, Me Worry?" face Alfred Neuman.

Pre-Mad postcard

Morgan later became a Mad contributor with "The Truth about Cowboys" in issue #33.

The definitive research on Alfred E. Neuman can be found in Maria Reidelbach's comprehensive bestseller, Completely Mad: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine (Little, Brown, 1991), since Mad publisher Bill Gaines gave her total access to the magazine's own files, including the collection of Neuman-related images assembled for legal purposes at the time of the Neuman lawsuit.

[edit] Appearances outside of Mad

In Daffy Duck's Quackbusters episode "The Night of the Living Duck" among the freakish nightclub "patrons" (such as Dracula) is Alfred E. Neuman.
In an extended sequence of the comic strip Peanuts (and later recreated in the TV special It's An Adventure, Charlie Brown), Charlie Brown becomes so obsessed with baseball that everything round starts looking like a baseball to him. Soon his own round head develops a pattern that makes the back of his skull look like a baseball, and he starts wearing a paper bag on his head to hide it. Ironically, while hidden from view, his popularity and respect increase. (In the TV special, he is suggested to go away to camp for about a week as well. While there he is referred to by the other campers as Mr. Sack, but is also voted camp president and is admired very much by the others.) The pattern eventually fades from his head, but Charlie Brown still fears that the next round thing he expects to see-- a sunrise-- may continue to look like a baseball. When the sun does rise, it instead looks like Alfred E. Neuman.
In the Simpsons episode The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson, Bart comes into contact with Alfred E. Neuman during a visit to the Mad Magazine offices. Neuman demands to see "Kaputnik and Fonebone" (which are references to late long-time Mad Magazine artists Dave Berg and Don Martin, respectively), and requests some "fershlugginer pastrami sandwiches". An awestruck Bart announces that he'll "never wash these eyes again." In the episode "Marge in chains", Marge meets Tattoo Annie who has a fold-in tattoo that reveals Alfred E. Neuman with the text: "What me Worry?". The original phrase was "What kind of slime would I marry."
In the Simpsons episode New Kids on the Blecch, Bart's boy band is booked to play a gig on an aircraft carrier, but their band manager plots to use the craft's weaponry to destroy Mad Magazine's headquarters in New York City when he discovers that the magazine plans to publish a defaming article about the band. The magazine's headquarters is shown as an office building with a giant three-dimensional replica of Alfred's head mounted on the roof.

[edit] Trivia

A female version of Alfred, named Moxie, appeared briefly during the late 1950s.
Alfred E. Neuman is referenced by the Beastie Boys on their song "Shadrach," featured on their second studio album, Paul's Boutique.